By now much of the nation has heard about the vicious and utterly unfounded lies being told by former president Donald Trump about the conduct of legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
Those lies have had immediate consequences – not only impugning the character and culture of the US Haitian diaspora but putting Haitian and other Springfield residents at risk of verbal and physical attack.
In the week following Trump’s smear of the Haitian community during his September 10 debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, more than 30 bomb threats were leveled against Springfield schools, hospitals and government buildings.
The Trump camp seems not to recognize or care about the risks to Black bodies. Following the debate, Haitian American journalist Yamiche Alcindor of NBC asked Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, if he was concerned about the collateral damage of Trump’s racist slurs.
Vance replied by suggesting that the harm to Haitian migrants was of less import than the hopes and dreams of their Springfield neighbors (who happen to be 80% white).
What Trump and Vance may not realize, however, is that it might be they who pay an ultimate price for their toxic falsehoods about Haitian and other immigrants.
Why? Because while the spotlight is on a few thousand non-voting Haitian immigrants in a small Midwest town, the United States is home to hundreds of thousands of eligible citizen voters of Haitian descent.
Haiti’s descendants are the second largest Black immigrant group in the U.S., with a population of at least 1.15 million – an estimate many believe underrepresents the community’s true total.
Of that figure, some 856,000 are U.S. citizens, including 632,000 eligible voters, according to Census data for 2023 (which excludes the roughly 19,000 Haitian Americans who aged into the electorate over the past year).
What’s more, the latest Census data show that Americans of Haitian descent have the voting strength to potentially tip the balance in battleground states that will decide this year’s contest.
A lion’s share of the U.S. Haitian diaspora lives in states that are not expected to be competitive this year – Florida, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey – which together claim 74% of the nation’s Haitian descendants.
But migration patterns over the past decade put tens of thousands of Haitian Americans in several of the states that were won by razor thin margins in 2020.
By my estimate (see sources and notes below), Georgia presents the most extreme case-in-point. President Joe Biden won the state by a mere 12,700 votes in 2020, which is fewer than Georgia’s eligible Haitian American voter population of about 20,000 today.
In the highly coveted Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the number of Haitian American eligible voters (about 18,500) equates to 23% of Biden’s margin of victory in 2020.
The Haitian community is smaller in the other battlegrounds, but still sizable enough to do damage to Trump.
In North Carolina, for example, which has only about 7,300 voting age Haitian Americans, the group nevertheless represents as much as 10% of Biden’s margin there four years ago. Arizona’s Haitian population is tiny – with only about 2,100 eligible voters – but this equates to a full one-fifth of Biden’s edge over Trump in 2020.
True enough – Kamala Harris likely already had the bulk of the community’s vote. But data show at least two ways Trump may have shot himself in the foot by attacking a community he wrongly perceived as powerless to clap back.
One, Haitian Americans vote differently than African Americans
On the whole, Haitian Americans are less Democratic-leaning and more religiously conservative than Black Americans, which means that Trump is attacking part of his own base, and in doing so, could drive thousands of votes into the Kamala Harris column.
In Florida, an analysis by University of Florida political scientist Dan Smith estimated that 20% of the state’s Haitian American voters sided with Trump in 2020 – which was double the percentage of African Americans who did.
Nationally, about 84% of Black Americans are Democrats or Democratic-leaning, according to Pew. That’s 11 points higher than the 72% of Haitian Americans who identified as Democrats in a national survey in 2023 by the Ayiti Diaspora Collaborative and Florida International University.
Two, Haitian Americans are gifted mobilizers
If the analysts are correct that this is a “turnout” race, Trump’s insults may have the unintended effect of driving Haitian American turnout for Harris to even higher heights than expected.
Haitian Americans have a long and proud history of mass mobilization and activation. Haitians are, after all, the original Black revolutionaries. Haiti is the world’s first Black-led republic and was the second country in the Americas to gain its independence (the first being the U.S.).
Trump has witnessed the community’s organizing prowess up close. It was the mass protest of over 100,000 Haitian Americans in 1990 in New York (Trump’s hometown) that ultimately led the US government to end the practice of citing Haitian ancestry as a risk factor for HIV – a false connection Trump continues to stoke.
The diaspora may be poised to unleash that same volume of energy against Trump come November. Only this time, instead of mass rallies in the streets, Haitian Americans may show up en masse at the ballot box.
Sources & Notes
US Census American Community Survey Table S0201 Selected Population Profile (2021, 2022, and 2023)
US Census Decennial Census Detailed Demographic & Housing Characteristics File A Table T01001 Total Population (2020)
Population estimates by state for 2024 were derived by adjusting 2020 figures by the Haitian population’s national average annual growth rate, which was calculated from changes between 2021 and 2023.
Eligible voter estimates were derived by applying the national figure for percentage of Haitians in the US who are citizens and the national figure for percentage who are adults, figures which may vary from state to state.
